


Corpse Cabriole

by amiesce



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Strangefrost is life, Strangefrost is love, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 14:19:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17623997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amiesce/pseuds/amiesce
Summary: On Titan, Stephen Strange looks into the future and the past. Foresight is 20/20; hindsight not so much.





	Corpse Cabriole

**Author's Note:**

> I messed a bit with the timeline to make this fic work. I'm not sure you'll even notice it, since the Doctor Strange movie is pretty stand-alone in the Marvel universe chronology, but I'll have a detailed timeline in the end notes if you're into that.

_In Future #1347, Loki’s corpse is picked up by autonomous scavenger droids cruising through the wreckage. Finding his form pleasing, they replace the defunct biological components with mechanical ones and program the body to perform menial tasks for the droids around their ship. The Snap has resulted in many more wreckages across the universe and, as a consequence, business is booming for scavengers.  
The existence that may have once been Loki never attains true sentience. Its singular mind never evolves to the capacity of remembering its past life, if such a life ever existed. The centuries pass and the undead cyborg lives on, if it can be called alive, until all traces of its former biology rot away._

* * *

I looked into every future and you were dead in all of them.

I shouldn't feel too torn up. You played dead all the time, especially near the end. Did you know something I didn't? It was the last straw for me when I found you dismembered in the middle of my library, your organs splattered all over the shelves. You always had such a colorful imagination. Anyway, if you must know, that was the reason I dropped you into a time-loop at the top of the Burj Khalifa during the half hour I chatted with your brother. I thought I was getting even. I didn't know it'd be the last time.

Still, that wasn't the worst fake death you've ever pulled on me. You know the one I mean.

Dying and popping back up must have seemed simple to you, but I still have nightmares about getting crushed by meteors or getting swallowed by a solar flare. Well, you knew about that. You were there when I woke up shaking and covered in sweat.

Part of me hopes that you're still out there, laughing at me for falling for the joke yet again. When Bruce Banner crashed through the roof of my sanctum, muttering about Thor and the end of the world, I thought that he was you in disguise. You'd be the first to run from a fight with Thanos - well, I thought that you would run. Part of me wishes you did. That's the part that knows you're already gone.

I remember you once faked a seizure in the middle of a restaurant, and I had to go through a farce of giving you CPR in front of that entire crowd when I could clearly see you were alive and smirking at me. I'd like to think that I paid you back later that night, but that could've been your plan all along. I don't want to know how many of your schemes were really just elaborate acts of foreplay.

You must have been so used to goading people into hating you. I wish I hadn't fallen for it as often as I did. Given time, I would have learned how to see through you better.

 

_In Future #465913, the space ice preserves Loki’s body. As it drifts through aimless space, a seed of the Pangaea Tree gets caught in the frozen folds of clothing. When the gravity of a supernova pulls Loki's body into a prolonged orbit that will ultimately result in its obliteration inside the forming black hole, the seed blooms in the presence of heat. Gardens spring out of the dead god’s chest. A settlement of tiny humanoid aliens, refugees of The Snap, finds brief and illusory shelter on this new and temporary planet._

* * *

I'd just turned 30 when you opened the wormhole over New York. Well, I learned about that after the fact. After I took over the New York Sanctum, I read about the invasion in a journal left by the previous guy in charge (murdered, in case I never told you how I ended up with the job). While you were tearing apart the fabric of space, I had flown out to LA to operate on the brain of someone famous, I can't remember who. I ended up dropping the case and going to Vegas to celebrate my birthday. What a pair we made.

We wouldn't have liked each other if we had met back then. But I bet the sex would have been pretty good. The god complex and the megalomaniac. I won't say which of us was which.

By the time we met, you had been ruler of the Nine Realms for two years already. What more could you want? Of course, you relied on lies and illusions to get there. Despite all your attempts to rehabilitate "Loki" in the minds of your people, you knew you'd never be able to rule Asgard as Loki. You wanted to take the credit. You were bored.

Once I figured you weren't going to sic any more aliens on the planet, there wasn't much standing in the way of me wanting to fuck you. You had a harder time, I think, seeing as how you never did get over the idea of humans being inferior life forms. Still, I don't think I'm being too conceited in saying I made you fall hard for me. Then again, given the number of times a day you called me a pompous prick, I guess my self-perception might not be the most accurate.

I challenged you. You didn't expect to have to fight a sorceror that first time you stepped back on Earth to check up on your father. I fought you on your level, that is, using oblique attacks and strategy instead of blunt force. Magic, other people call it. Finally, you must have thought, you'd found someone who spoke your language.

Someone who let you escape ten times before, who on the eleventh time didn't let you go but instead kissed you harder than you'd ever been kissed before, getting you to make that little kitten sound that turns me on more than anything else in the world.

It was only sex in the beginning. I thought I had more than enough experience to keep things that way. You had other plans, as always. For example, asking to stay the night. Of course I had to have one of my nightmares the first time you did. I thought you'd be too embarrassed to try and comfort me, and it's true that you didn't say anything. If you were here now, you'd probably say you have no idea what I'm talking about. Maybe you'd be telling the truth.

I'll tell you what you did. You pushed the hair off my damp forehead, blew cold air onto my skin, then chuckled when I shivered. I fell for you then, and hard.

 

_In Future #50073, Valkyrie feels unsettled and, leaving the last of the Asgardians under the care of Korg, goes out to look for the ship, or what remained of it. She doesn't know yet that she has hours to live. She's not surprised by the carnage but is surprised to find Loki floating among the detritus. Not knowing whether Thor is still alive, she knows he would want her to bring the body home - wherever that was now - and give him a proper burial. She is still flying back to the temporary Asgardian settlement camp when the Snap obliterates her, leaving her ship and Loki's unburied body to eventually be ripped apart by a migrating astroid field._

* * *

Christine never trusted you. Of course, she only knew you as a long-haired freeloader who could talk about all the mystic mumbo jumbo that she never bothered trying to understand. My exes all get along, but they can never stand whoever I'm currently dating. She said you had no sense of human empathy. Well, you weren't human, so I didn't bother correcting her.

You and I didn't talk much about ourselves. Surprising, given our huge egos. I never talked about Donna, for example, and I don't think you knew that she even existed. Some days even I forget that she did. She would have loved you. She always had a soft spot for injured animals.

Donna knew at age 4 that she wanted to be a vet. I didn't have any big plans back then - I just had a photographic memory, excelled at anything I tried, and was smarter than anyone I knew. Once, she found a fox in our backyard that looked like it'd been chewed on by a bigger animal. I told her not to get attached, but she was convinced that she could overwrite several millennia of evolutionary history and make a pet out of it.

Needless to say, it nearly bit her hand off once it'd recovered enough. Of course, I already confirmed it didn't have rabies. I'd just turned sixteen and gotten my license, so I drove her to the emergency room. I saw at a glance that the ER was a hopeless mess and that I could have researched how to apply sutures and stitched her up myself in half the time it took for them to look at her. I was going to call pest control, but Donna told me not to and made me stay with her the whole time. He was scared, she said, so he was just trying to protect himself. He'd been hurt badly before, and had no way of knowing that he wouldn't be hurt again.

Well, my mother discovered the animal while we were gone and chased it out of the house. Donna shut herself in her room for days. In two years she would be dead.

I'd like to go back to meet your younger self, if time travel worked that way. There's no deep reason, just that you once mentioned you had shorter hair back then.

 

_In Future #1148034, a certain space parasite incubates in Loki’s body, slowly generating its own alien cells, until it finally sloughs off its dead carapace to reveal a new body identical in appearance to the old one. This recreated Loki makes its way to nearby Zaria, which never recovered after the decimation of the population. Zaria is an icy planet, which suits the parasite just fine. Zarians have a physical form that closely resembles Earth's pine trees, communicating with a complex net of psychic signals. They tell the alien with the form of Loki about their predicament in the wake of the culling, begging for its help.  
The alien lives out the remainder of its days tending to the last of the Zarians as the species makes the slow march toward extinction. It remains ignorant of Earth or any other solar system, and is unimportant to any grand scheme for rescuing the universe._

* * *

 You knew you'd succeeding in making me hate you when you pretended to shoot yourself in the head, after we'd been fighting all day about me accompanying Christine to her father's funeral. That was why you didn't laugh afterward. Instead, you flinched when I tried to pull you close. You were always at your worst when you were jealous.

You'll never understand what you put me through, staying dead for hours like that. I had to stand over your body and pray to gods I didn't believe in, hoping that you would get up again, dust yourself off, and make fun of the face I was making. 

I can't stop thinking about the way you flinched, even now as I'm sitting on a rock on this alien planet, light years away from home. I should be preparing for the most important fight in my life to defend the universe against the worst monster in existence (yes, even worse than you). After the hell you put me through, I had to comfort you, make you feel safe. I did all that. And the next time I saw you, you were in forty pieces all over my library floor.

Even if this is another one of your jokes, if you appear before me right now (giving Stark a heart attack while you're at it), it wouldn't come close to making me feel the way I felt that long night, when you made me wait, and doubt everything.

**Author's Note:**

> Slightly AU Timeline (adapted from http://collider.com/mcu-timeline-explained/):
> 
> May 2012 - New York battle, Loki is imprisoned (Avengers 1, canon)  
> Nov 2013 - Loki freed, takes control of Asgard (Thor 2, canon)  
> May 2014 - Strange's accident (not canon, should be 2016)  
> Mar 2015 - Strange defeats Dormammu and takes over the NY Sanctum (not canon, should be 2017)  
> Sometime later in 2015 - Strange and Loki meet  
> Fall 2017 - events of Ragnorak (canon)
> 
> Basically, Strange and Loki have a chance to meet earlier and know each other for longer than the canonical timeline would allow.


End file.
